Bugs

Insects are the bane of my existence. I absolutely despise every single one of them, except for butterflies and moths.

This is completely aberrational, as I was born in India and lived there for ten years surrounded by every hopping, flying, crawling, biting thing known to man. And to top it all off, I followed with three years in Zaire (now the Congo) with moths as big as sparrows, spiders the size of dinner plates, things in the yard that stung you anonymously so that all you could do was scream and run, and just bugs — bloody bugs everywhere, all day, all night, in your room, in your bed, on your wall, in your face. Rats, snakes — bring ‘em on! Just keep away the fucking bugs.

Well, I and my siblings fought back. There were ant trains the width of four inches that would march onto the terrace and try to invade the house. They were the small type of red ants, but it didn’t make it any less pleasurable to take a spray can — I can’t remember what was in it — and lift a Zippo lighter to it and flay them all to tiny shriveled hulks in seconds. Fun, but very dangerous. I don’t know how we survived, but I’m glad they didn’t.

And then there were the cockroaches. You’d be blown away by coming into your bedroom and seeing one on the wall — sometimes up to four inches long, so old and almost blond that we dubbed them "Grandaddies."
But they could fly, they could crawl up a perpendicular wall and even on the ceiling. Not a good recipe for a sound night’s sleep.

We had a small pantry area where the cook kept the potatoes in bags. Dark, dank, just the place cockroaches like.

I had an air gun that I’d bought in England. I’d run out of the BB pellets, so we rolled tin foil very very tightly into balls, and got ready. We’d swing open the door and the fuckers would begin scuttling from the potato sacks and then we’d shoot them. I was a good shot, but they just weren’t in a hurry to die. It was a mess.

Then there was the summer that the Things came. I still don’t know what they were but they were about half an inch long and flew and were black or red, always a bad sign. They would land on you and if somehow you tried to brush them off they would leave some kind of acid on you that wouldn’t go away — they’d land on your forearm and you’d brush them off and then touch your upper arm with your forearm and there would develop two identical screaming, burning rashes. I was lucky that I never got attacked but there were hundreds of cases that I later heard were near fatal.

One day we somehow managed to rescue a chameleon from a snake park (zoo) in Kenya, and we flew him home. We named him Ollie. He was none too happy being flown to Zaire, turned positively black, but once we got there he was in chameleon heaven (and turned bright green.) And so were we. We staged daily fly raids, where we’d hold him up to some asshole fly on a wall and he’d blast it with his tongue. He never missed. Hundreds of flies went down. Sadly, he was so slow-moving that he wandered off someone’s arm on the terrace and into the garden, unnoticed. I will have to say that without question, he was best pet I ever had. How many of yours work for a living?

Flash: Montreal, tonight. I’m settling down in my 8th floor apartment with the A/C on and I feel a tiny crawl on my arm. A fucking ant.

Then I look in horror at the ghastly scene: there’s a huge swarm of the little assholes on the tatami around a bag of corn chips I was just eating from ten minutes ago, with Dave's Gourmet Insanity Salsa, which is one of the hottest in the world. I was wondering why it tasted particularly good tonight and now I know. I must have gone back to the salsa jar and refilled and kept munching at least twelve times in the dark. Those little fuckers were mixing with the salsa and stinging my tongue.

Fucking bugs make my skin crawl. But they taste good. That’s my sweetest revenge.